The Narrator and Apollo Stay at a Long Island Cottage

The Narrator and Apollo’s stay at a Long Island cottage is a temporary reprieve shaped by the realities of Apollo’s old age: the apartment has become difficult to keep clean, and the stairs are no longer manageable for him. A friend’s offer of an empty summer cottage makes it possible to leave the city for a while. Getting Apollo there requires help and a makeshift ramp, but the cottage offers a porch with only two steps, room to be outdoors, and a final summer whose pleasures are inseparable from the knowledge that it is also a goodbye.

The Need to Leave the Apartment

By the time the move becomes necessary, Apollo can no longer comfortably manage the five flights of stairs to the Narrator’s apartment. The neighbors have grown accustomed to seeing him, and most respond warmly to the gentle giant. One retired nurse questions his designation as a therapy animal, although she too remarks on his good manners: in the tight elevator, he scrunches himself small to take up less room. As the stairs become impractical, the elevator becomes their ordinary way in and out of the building.

That shared space also makes Apollo’s physical decline harder to conceal. His coat grows pungent, his breath stinks, and his drool becomes ropy; in the elevator’s close, hot air, the odors are difficult to ignore. Accidents become nearly daily occurrences in the elevator, hallway, carpeted lobby, and especially the apartment. A delivery man compares the smell to a stable, another person to a zoo, while Hector says nothing. The Narrator removes three rugs, the couch, and the bed, replaces them with a second rubber air mattress, and sleeps beside Apollo on the two mattresses on the floor. Vigorous mopping and scrubbing, and several bottles of Lysol each week, do not remove the odor, which settles into the wood floors and bookshelves and seems to cling to the Narrator’s clothes as well.

The cottage is proposed as practical relief, not as a cure for Apollo’s decline. A sympathetic friend explains that his mother has entered a nursing home and that her summer cottage on Long Island has been sold, though the new owners will not take possession until after Labor Day. They plan to gut and renovate it, so damage from a dog will not matter; Apollo can also spend much of his time outdoors. The friend has hardly used the place himself and offers it for the remaining two weeks of summer, recognizing that the Narrator needs it more. He also offers to see what can be done about the apartment while they are away.

Getting Apollo There

The friend drives them to the cottage in his SUV, but the journey begins with the problem of lifting Apollo into it without hurting him. Hector finds a makeshift solution in an old door stored in the building basement, turning it into a ramp. The improvised aid makes the move possible without requiring Apollo to climb into the vehicle under his own power. His role is one of practical assistance: the same Hector who has encountered the dog in the building now helps the Narrator manage the consequences of his frailty.

At the cottage, the obstacles are smaller. There are no flights of stairs, only two little steps to the porch, and no car is needed for daily errands. The Narrator can ride a bicycle six miles into town for groceries. The arrangement is explicitly temporary: after a week, the friend is due to return in his SUV and drive them home. The place offers a change in surroundings and a respite from the apartment’s accumulated odor, while leaving the underlying demands of caring for Apollo intact.

A Summer in a Different Key

The first night begins with a spectacular storm. The Narrator and Apollo huddle together beneath a roof that sounds as if it is being strafed. By morning the rain has stopped, and the calm seems to uncover a newly bright, clean world. The Narrator associates the transformation with Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and with the nearly imaginable smell of blue. The contrast is striking: the weeks before the move had been hard, marked by accidents, cleaning, and the struggle to get Apollo up and down the stairs; here, the days feel glorious.

The beach offers a recurring sight that clarifies the difference between Apollo’s stage of life and the vitality around him. Around dusk, the Narrator and Apollo sometimes watch a young, shirtless man with ice-blond hair throw a stick far out into the water for his Weimaraner. The dog swims out again and again, then races back triumphantly to drop the stick at the man’s feet. The Narrator feels envy at the strength and apparent happiness of the young man and dog. Apollo, watching with his habitual calm, seems untouched by envy, yearning, or nostalgia. The scene does not make his decline less visible; it sets that decline beside an image of tireless energy and makes the distance between the two dogs’ capacities unmistakable.

One More Summer

The stay is framed as borrowed time rather than a fresh beginning. The Narrator recalls thinking Apollo’s final moment had arrived when he left breakfast untouched, then breaking off some breakfast bread and feeding him a piece by hand. His appetite returned by evening. That brief recovery allows the Narrator to turn away from the forecast of immediate loss and attend to the day at hand: Apollo stretched out contentedly in the sun, and the gift of a perfect summer morning.

The central recognition is modest and consequential: Apollo has had one more summer, and the Narrator has the chance to say goodbye. The Narrator acknowledges that it has become difficult to tell whether the words are addressed to Apollo or spoken inwardly. That blurred address suits the intimacy of the stay: Apollo is the companion for whom the cottage was secured and the presence beside whom the Narrator measures each remaining day, while the act of speaking also helps the Narrator live with what is coming. The cottage does not reverse Apollo’s physical decline or promise more time beyond this reprieve. Its significance lies in making room for their companionship, and for a farewell that the Narrator can recognize as such.